Prigozhin’s connections complicate all of Putin’s purge plans

Meeting with Russian media figures behind closed doors on Tuesday evening, President Vladimir V. Putin presented himself as a leader who took matters into his own hands and delved into Yevgeny V. Prigozhin’s business contracts with the Russian Defense Ministry, according to a person who was there .

The person, newspaper editor Konstantin Remchukov, said Mr Putin also portrayed himself as fully involved in last weekend’s 24-hour uprising by Mr Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner paramilitary group.

“Putin said he didn’t sleep a minute during the uprising,” Remchukov said in a telephone interview from Moscow. In the aftermath of the uprising, he said, Mr. Putin seemed focused on the economic motives that guided Mr. Prigozhin: “He is deep in the numbers of the Prigozhin contracts, the money flows.”

Those details of Putin’s Kremlin meeting with pro-war bloggers and Russian media chiefs show how the Russian president is going on the offensive to counter the sense that the weekend’s events showed he was losing control. The focus on Mr. Prigozhin’s financial dealings allowed Mr. Putin to shift the storyline away from the perceived threat to his leadership, and view Mr. Prigozhin’s short-lived mutiny as a personal complaint about money.

Mr Putin indicated that while he allowed Mr Prigozhin and his fighters to have refuge in neighboring Belarus, the mercenary leader’s associates in the government and elsewhere could still face repercussions. Several pro-war Russian blogs reported this week that authorities were investigating military members associated with Mr Prigozhin, but those reports could not be independently confirmed.

The problem for Mr. Putin is that Mr. Prigozhin has built a web of connections deep into Russia’s ruling elite, starting when he ran the best restaurants and banquets in St. Petersburg in the 1990s.

Mr Putin himself hinted at the depth of Mr Prigozhin’s ties to the government in his public remarks on Tuesday. had spent another $1 billion to fund his mercenaries.

Mr. Remchukov said that Mr. Putin came back to that theme in the closed session on Tuesday night and that it was clear that Mr. Putin was “trying to get to the bottom of the whole economic background” of Mr. Prigozhin’s financial arrangements with the government.

On Wednesday, Mr Putin tried to show that he was going back to normal. He flew to the southern Russian region of Dagestan to talk about domestic tourism, touting the expansion of the local brandy industry and, according to the Kremlin transcript, not to mention the weekend’s uprising.

But back in Moscow, where the nature of Putin’s long-term response to the uprising was a matter of guesswork, members of Russia’s elite were still trying to show their loyalty and disown past ties to Mr. Prigozhin.

“It’s a very complicated question” who should be punished for their ties to Mr Prigozhin, said Oleg Matveychev, a member of Russia’s parliament and long-time pro-Kremlin political adviser.

Those targeted, he said in a telephone interview, would not be those who were merely “pictured with Prigozhin somewhere,” but those who “actively cover for him, actively continue to do so and actively oppose the president’s policies enter”.

Mr Matveychev acknowledged working with Mr Prigozhin and his internet “troll farm” about a decade ago, but said he ended the collaboration after concluding that Mr Prigozhin was a “mentally unstable person”.

The stakes are high who will be punished for Mr. Prigozhin’s rebellion, especially since some of Mr. Prigozhin’s main allies and sympathizers are believed to be in the military. Mr. Remchukov said there was intense speculation in Moscow about the fate of Sergei Surovikin, a senior general who had publicly praised Mr. Prigozhin. The New York Times reported Tuesday that U.S. officials believe General Surovikin knew about the uprising in advance.

“I think they’re going to ask why he was so quiet” and didn’t speak to Mr. Prigozhin before the uprising, Mr. Remchukov said of General Surovikin. “Were there interests, was there any connection?” On Wednesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitri S. Peskov called The Times report “speculation” but did not deny the coverage or express support for the general, who has not been heard since appearing in a video last Friday night in which he begged the rebels to stand down.

But Mr. Prigozhin’s ties also extend far beyond the military. After a career in the shadows, Mr. Prigozhin turned himself into a public figure in the past year, portraying himself as a tough mercenary leader far more effective than the traditional military. He regularly berated and belittled military leaders such as Sergei K. Shoigu, the Russian Defense Minister.

In the past year, pro-Kremlin figures trying to prove their patriotic bona fides rushed to Mr. Prigozhin’s cart.

The son of Kremlin spokesman Dmitri S. Peskov, boasted that he had joined an artillery unit in Mr. Prigozhin’s Wagner group and earned a medal “for bravery.” The head of a party in the Russian parliament, Sergei Mironov, posed with a sledgehammer decorated with the Wagner badge – a pile of skulls and a hand-drawn smiley face.

The sledgehammer became Mr Prigozhin’s trademark last year after he endorsed its use in the gruesome execution of a Wagner fighter who had surrendered to Ukraine.

“Thanks to Yevgeny Prigozhin for the gift,” Mr. Mironov wrote on Twitter in January. “This is a useful tool.”

But by Tuesday, Mr. Mironov had turned himself into a bulwark against Mr. Prigozhin’s rebellion. He called for an investigation into what he claimed to be a “line of VIPs — civil servants and civil servants” who left the country en masse from the private jet terminal of Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport during Wagner’s abbreviated march to Moscow on Saturday.

“This is a fifth column!” He wrote on social media, without naming names. “Traitors to the Motherland!”

There was also the question of who stood up for Putin while the uprising was going on, and who remained silent. One Moscow political analyst Mikhail Vinogradov published what he called an “oath rating” on the Telegram social network that listed down to the minute what time on Saturday Russia’s more than 80 regional governors posted a statement of support for Mr Putin, if they did – and listed the 21 who did not post such messages at all.

Mr. Vinogradov said in an interview that it would be a mistake to draw serious conclusions from his assessment, but Mr. Matveychev, the MP, said he found the list revealing.

“I took one look and drew conclusions,” Mr Matveychev said, “that a person is, let’s say, unreliable and could act differently next time.”

Mr Matveychev stressed that the aborted uprising was positive for Russia, as its failure “boosts the image of the authorities” and acts as a “vaccine” against future uprisings. And Mr. Remchukov, the newspaper’s editor, said despite his prediction on Sunday that Mr. Putin might not stand for re-election next year because of the insurgency that tarnished his image, he has seen Moscow’s Kremlin-linked elite come together with Mr. Remchukov. Putin’s side as he attempts to telegraph power.

“Putin is now fully focused on sending the message to the elites that ‘I can protect you,'” Remchukov said. “Now, I think there will be some very energetic actions to show this because his whole logic is to show that this was nothing but treachery.”

But others saw Mr Prigozhin’s challenge as a problem for Mr Putin, especially as the war continues and members of the elite seem to blame each other for misfortunes at the front.

“This is a signal that the governance system is not coping well with the stress of wartime,” said Moscow analyst Vinogradov. “Certainly not in the past two months, when everyone was waiting for a successful Ukrainian counter-offensive and preparing to turn on each other – and even the failure of that success didn’t change this at all.”

For the Russian public and military backers, the aftermath of the uprising is a moment of whiplash, with Prigozhin’s Wagner force – which had achieved Russia’s only recent success on the battlefield and been celebrated by pro-war bloggers and sometimes the state media – being redeployed as traitors.

Leonid Ivashov, a retired senior Russian general who has spoken out against the war but has remained in Russia, summed up the overarching question hovering over society and the military as follows: “What’s going on?”

“Many cannot understand what the government actually wants,” General Ivashov said in a telephone interview. “The first question is: what is happening in the country and the military?”